--House of Mirth (blog)
--Publishers Weekly
--East Bay Express (Emeryville, CA)
--KZYK Public Radio (Mendocino, CA)
--St. Louis Post-Dispatch
--Inside Higher Ed (website)
--Creative Loafing (Charlotte, NC)
--Washington Post Book World
--Seven Days (Burlington, VT)
House of Mirth, James Marcus, reviewer, June 23 (http://housemirth.blogspot.com/)
ALL HAIL CAMPUS SEXPOT
Last night I devoured David Carkeet's Campus Sexpot, a narrow-gauge work of autobiography with a donn�e to die for: when the author was fifteen, a former teacher at his high school published a potboiler with the identical title. This caused a scandal among the citizenry of sleepy Sonora, California, many of whom recognized thinly-disguised versions of themselves among the dramatis personae. It also jump-started Carkeet's education as a sexual being (although he bowed to his mother's wishes by tossing the book in the incinerator) and a writer (ditto). He makes no great claims for the literary merits of this rather quaint specimen of early-Sixties porn: quite the opposite. Yet it still does play a talismanic role for him:
"I confess that the good parts work a certain magic on me, but only in a roundabout way, through a historical path where I become a young teenager and understand sex as I understood it at that age. When I read the book now, its verbal avoidance of body parts with which I am actually familiar returns them to a thrilling condition of mystery. I don't have to make an effort to enter this frame of mind. Instead, the words in Campus Sexpot that lead up to a saucy scene fire ancient neurons, and before I know it, I am transported into a state of salacious ignorance."
This isn't really a book about sex, of course. In a sense, it's about the slow, steady, mortifying accumulation of worldliness. (Perhaps it should have been called Speak, Puberty.) But Carkeet has also produced a comical hologram of small-town life, where the atmosphere of relative innocence is presided over by the local magistrate, who happens to be Carkeet's father. His verdict on his adult son? "You're a good boy," he tells him on the final page, and the good boy has written a VERY good book.
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Publishers Weekly, July 11
Novelist Carkeet (Error of Our Ways) revisits the 1962 scandal of his Sonora, Calif., high school in this saucy, fanciful slice of creative nonfiction. Campus Sexpot was a sexy pulp novel that appeared in the author's small middle-class community when he was 15, reportedly written by a former Sonora high school teacher who fled to Mexico. The steamy roman � clef barely disguised the identity of the real characters involved in the affair between a newly arrived English teacher, Don Kaufield (aka the book's author, Dale Koby) and his 19-year-old, amply endowed student, Linda Franklin. In a nimble narrative, Carkeet transforms the reading of his first smutty book into a shrimpy boy's sexual initiation during the buttoned-up Kennedy years. Carkeet annotates excerpts from the novel, especially the seduction scenes between nubile, willing Linda and her married teacher ("I'll try not to interrupt anymore," promises Carkeet); he expands on notable characters and fills in prurient information. The first Campus Sexpot ends with a heroic paean to the father-son relationship; Carkeet concludes similarly with a tribute to his upstanding father, who puzzled about people's choice of the dark side: "Why be bad when you can be good?"
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East Bay Express (Emeryville, CA), Anneli Rufus, reviewer, Aug. 31
[in a group review]
. . . Passion of a different sort has a teacher spending after-school hours with a student in the story-within-a-story of Campus Sexpot (University of Georgia, $22.95), David Carkeet's memoir about how his ex-high school teacher wrote a smutty and possibly autobiographical potboiler--also called Campus Sexpot--that scandalized the small Mother Lode town of Sonora in 1962. Carkeet was fifteen and impish English instructor Dale Koby was far from Sonora by the time the book came out, far from its fallout as residents started playing who's-who. Conceptwise it's classic slapstick: small-town kids and adults in a buttoned-up era straining to pick up techniques from pulp fiction. But Carkeet, who is now a novelist, knows how to milk jokes and then fix without flinching on the sad human dramas fueling them. In Koby's potboiler as in Carkeet's life, "it was a general assumption that good boys who got good grades had no libido." It's a book about secrets, and how learning is like a game of Telephone. . .
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KZYX Public Radio (Mendocino County, CA), Tony Miksak, reviewer, Sept. 18, 19
The book is a modest new hard cover from University of Georgia Press. It's getting so that quirky little gems like this no longer are being published as often by the conglomerates, because expected sales don't meet chainstore expectations. It's up to the small presses and University presses, even print-on-demand agencies, to publish fine books that may not sell many copies.
Campus Sexpot, however, will sell copies when the word gets out. It has all the right ingredients. It is funny, sexy, moving, a quick read, but a deep one.
If you get past the picture on the jacket showing a kid standing on a chair in order to kiss an older girl you'll find this copy on the inside flap:
"In 1962 David Carkeet's drowsy hometown of Sonora, California, snapped awake at the news that it had inspired a smutty potboiler titled 'Campus Sexpot.' Before leaving town on short notice, the novel's author had been an English teacher at the local high school, where Carkeet was a hormone-saturated sophomore. Leaving was a good idea, it turned out, for most of the characters in 'Campus Sexpot' had been modeled after Sonora's citizens."
The reader of Carkeet's book may suspect that he started out simply to tell the story of this silly, dirty book. He does that very well, with a kind of mock-serious literary analysis of the innocently pornographic text.
"Linda Franklin had not been to bed with every boy in the junior college of Wattsville, but at nineteen she had known physical intimacy with a high percentage of those boys who knew enough to appreciate her amply endowed body."
"As first sentences go, it's a good one," Carkeet reflects... "It treats Linda Franklin's promiscuity like a familiar subject, it shows a touch of wit in its sober contradiction of a preposterous assertion... and its categorical precision... tells us we are in the hands of an author with a working mind.
"But I did not see these strengths when I first read these words. I was fifteen years old, the year was 1962, and to me the opening sentence was a mounting wave that swelled to the climax of 'amply endowed body.' To a small-town boy in 1962, 'amply endowed body' was like two large breasts slapping him in the face."
And with that admission we are off on a wild ride down memory lane. Carkeet's memoir splits in two on the very first page. We are reading about two very different people here, the unsophisticated but smart kid of 15, and the mature writer of 60 with five published novels to his credit.
The dissonance between the two Carkeets makes for many funny scenes. Gradually Carkeet's story grows into something quite personal and revealing, as all good biographies must.
Carkeet's relationship with his father, Judge Carkeet, takes up a good part of the book, and that story is achingly well told.
Readers also will appreciate some of the side tracks. In a chapter on teachers ("There is no teaching in 'Campus Sexpot' he notes) Carkeet reflects, "The teachers that cross our paths illustrate the frightening role that chance plays in our lives..."
"From kindergarten through several years of university study, I had 108 different teachers. A few were awful, most were okay, a few were stellar. But when I think of these three -- Mrs. Borelli, Mr. Wilkins, and Mr. Cannon -- I imagine them putting me in a giant slingshot, pulling back on the elastic, giving me a farewell pat on the head, and letting go."
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St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Steve Weinberg, reviewer, Oct. 16
Memoirs are, by definition, unique in their content. But leave it to David Carkeet, former St. Louisan and novelist extraordinare, to take the form a step further with his own inventive coming-of-age story.
The memoir is set in 1962 in his hometown of Sonora, Calif., a somewhat remote place in the mountains. At the time, Carkeet was an impressionable, horny, diminutive, 15-year-old goody-goody who played in the school band.
The town's citizens were scandalized that year with the publication of a smutty novel titled "Campus Sexpot," which was set in a thinly disguised Sonora and populated with thinly disguised Sonorans. The author of the story was Dale Koby, a high school teacher who had left town the year before under mysterious circumstances.
Like many Sonorans, upright and otherwise, Carkeet read the book (devoured might be a more accurate word in his case). The sex scenes, rather mild by today's standards, were turn-ons for a 15-year-old boy. In the novel, a married male teacher consummates a sexual liaison with a willing female student.
Carkeet gives readers more than a small flavor of the fiction account's cliched language and thin plot. He reprints passages from the novel, then riffs from those passages to events from his own life. Mostly, Carkeet addresses his sexual curiosity as a teenager. The memoir moves beyond that, however, by introducing us to his older sister and brother, his homemaker mother, his father (the local judge in the rural county), his classmates, his teachers.
In the first passage from Carkeet's book, the words from the smutty novel are set in boldface type: "Linda Franklin had not been to bed with every boy in the junior college of Wattsville, but at 19 she had known physical intimacy with a high percentage of those boys who knew enough to appreciate her amply endowed body."
Carkeet's first riff on the novel is representative of this delightful memoir: "As first sentences go, it's a good one. It treats Linda Franklin's promiscuity like a familiar subject, it shows a touch of wit . . . and its categorical precision . . . tells us we are in the hands of an author with a working mind. But I did not see these strengths when I first read these words. I was 15 years old, the year was 1962, and to me the opening sentence was a mounting wave that swelled to the climax of 'amply endowed body.' To a small-town boy in 1962, 'amply endowed body' was like two large breasts slapping him in the face. I had come home late from an out-of-town wrestling match to find my mother, her cheeks aflame, reading 'Campus Sexpot.' It was without a doubt her first and last smutty book. She was reading it because everyone else in town was reading it. . . . 'This is terrible!' my mother declared from under her reading lamp, but she let me read it, and after I did, I burned it in the backyard incinerator. In those days, burning paper products outdoors was a regular practice."
Carkeet's memoir, while mostly upbeat, contains its moments of seriousness, as when we learn of his father's alcoholism, an affliction passed on to the son. But both men manage to halt their excessive drinking and live happily ever after, more or less.
Carkeet moved to Vermont two years ago after decades of teaching creative writing and English at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. His novels ("Double Negative," "The Greatest Slump of All Time," "I Been There Before," "The Full Catastrophe" and "The Error of Our Ways") are both poignant and humorous. "Campus Sexpot" does not disappoint as a follow-up to these books.
As for Dale Koby, Carkeet tracks his relatively long run as a smut novelist, until his 1979 death in Los Angeles.
If only Koby could see this great and unusual resurrection of his otherwise forgettable first novel.
(Steve Weinberg is a director of the National Book Critics Circle.)
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Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee, reviewer, Nov. 3
Campus Sexpot is the title of a moderately sleazy potboiler from 1961 � a tale of faculty-student relations at a small-town junior college where, it seems, the graduates of Peyton Place High School continued their educations. The author was one Dale Koby. A search of online bookdealers reveals that he went on to a fairly prolific career as pulp author, turning out such memorable titles as Sex by Appointment, Lust on Wheels and Perverted Wife. Koby also edited some not-quite-scholarly editions of classic (or at least old) erotica. But most of his ouevre is missing from the catalog of the Library of Congress. It lists him only as the author of A Teacher Confesses to Sex in the Classroom, a work from 1965 revisiting certain themes from his first novel.
Koby was a terrible writer. (Sample: �She thrust her breasts up at him with a pert sauciness.") But by 1962, he had an attentive readership in the California mountain town of Sonora, where he had worked, for about three semesters, as a high-school teacher. David Carkeet, who was for many years director of the MFA program at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, was a student at the school at the time. As he recalls in Campus Sexpot: A Memoir, published by the University of Georgia Press, it was not hard to figure out the real-life identities of Koby�s characters.
Chances are, Carkeet would have studied the novel closely in any case, even apart from the interesting questions it raised about the relationship between life and art. He was 15 when the book appeared, and glad for whatever information on sex he could find � such as that information was, in a book that carefully avoiding descriptions of everything below the waist. �For all the genital detail we�re going to get,� notes Carkeet about one of Koby�s characters, �Linda might as well be a mermaid.�
Carkeet is the winner of the award for creative nonfiction from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. That information is announced on the cover, just above a high-school newspaper photo of the author standing on a chair, kissing a much taller girl under the mistletoe. Any writer looking back at adolescence must, of course, face the complications of embarrassment. (It is not just one part of the memories, but part of the writer�s present toolkit: There is a skill involved in handling embarrassment, in using it to carve a shape out of the past.) Inspired by the insight that the trash that once fascinated us gives the quickest access to the identities we�ve shed, Carkeet uses Campus Sexpot as a way to excavate memories otherwise too disobliging to recall.
�When I read the book now,� he says, �its verbal avoidance of body parts with which I am actually familiar returns them to a thrilling condition of mystery. I don�t have to make an effort to enter this frame of mind. Instead, the words in Campus Sexpot that lead up to a saucy scene fire ancient neurons, and before I know it, I am transported into a state of salacious ignorance.�
Any work of pulp-era smut consists of two sorts of writing. There are �the good parts,� which the reader revisits until they become very familiar, and the rest, which is just barely tolerable the first time. �The chief device for advancing the story,� writes Carkeet, �is not action but constant banal dialogue; the reader of a Koby novel longs to enter it not in order to have sex but in order to tell everyone to shut up.�
Umberto Eco once made a similar distinction regarding the semiotics of pre-video porn films � which were, as he put it, �full of people who climb into cars and drive for miles and miles, couples who waste incredible amounts of time signing in at hotel desks, gentlemen who spend many minutes in elevators before reaching their rooms.... To put it simply, crudely, in porn movies, before you can see a healthy screw, you have to put up with a documentary that could be sponsored by the Traffic Bureau.�
Carkeet reproduces the �good bits� from the original Campus Sexpot in bold. This is not just a typographical device, or a convenience to the reader, but an index of how much they had burned themselves into his memory. One passage in particular seems like a key to understanding the effect of the novel on him. (It is also a good example of Koby�s prose at its most fine-honed.) In it, a professor named Paul Skell comments on a student, Linda Franklin, who is the titular campus sexpot:
�Hips made for the act of love,� Paul muttered, �and ideally designed to accommodate a pair of hot pants. If she�s a virgin, I�ll donate half of my salary this year to a home for wayward girls. I�ve spent my long career. I�ve studied them from every angle. I believe I know all the symptoms, and Linda Franklin has them.�
This came as a revelation. The original of �Paul Skell� � easily recognizable from his description to those who attended his school � was the dull and high-minded pedant who taught Carkeet�s freshman English class, and a leader in the local DeMolay assembly. For those not in the know, the DeMolay order is the male youth auxiliary of the Freemasons. It provides �a regimen of enforced dignity for boys at an undignified age,� as Carkeet writes, �and the primary engine of uplift is a vast body of ornate ritual that reads like the Boy Scout oath as revised and expanded by Samuel Johnson.� To imagine that a severe and proper adult might have �spent [his] long career� studying hot pants �from every angle� was a decisive moment in Carkeet�s sentimental education.
My hope, as a reader, was that Carkeet would track down the author of Campus Sexpot and find out what he was doing now. Koby wrote and edited for the pulp-porn industry up through the late 1960s, and Carkeet tracks down some of these subsequent efforts. (�Appointment by Sex treats a phenomenon I was unaware of when I was growing up � supermarket cashiers doubling as lesbian prostitutes who meet the needs of shopping housewives neglected by their husbands.") But his creative output declined after 1968, for reasons that are anybody�s guess; and he died sometime in the 1980s.
Insofar as the original Campus Sexpot may be said to have had a plot, its denouement occurs at the courthouse, where Koby has his characters gather for a final melodramatic reckoning. And in real life, too, Sonora had a courthouse, where Carkeet�s father served as the town�s judge. The final chapter of Campus Sexpot: A Memoir is a portrait of the author�s old man � a recognition of his failings, but also a tribute to him as someone with the moral center that the pulp novelist lacked.
It�s not for readers to determine the justice of that conclusion, of course: We know only as much as Carkeet tells us. But as an ending, it certainly follows from the book�s effort to work out the parallels and the divergences between fact and fiction.
It also flows from the memoiristic logic of deriving insight from embarrassment. The 15 year-old reader of the novel grew up to be a novelist and a writing teacher himself. No doubt he had a somewhat romanticized version of Koby at the back of his mind � remembering him as freewheeling beatnik living outside respectable society, and so on. How humiliating to discover that, all along, the more complex and interesting figure may have been your real father, not the surrogate.
(Scott McLemee writes the Intellectual Affairs column for Inside Higher Ed. In 2004, the National Book Critics Circle honored him with its annual Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, for his work appearing in Bookforum, The Common Review, Newsday, and The Washington Post. He writes frequently for The American Prospect and The New York Times Book Review.)
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Creative Loafing (Charlotte, NC), John Grooms, reviewer, Nov. 23
Novelist Carkeet (Double Negative, The Full Catastrophe) gets very creative with creative nonfiction in this funny and oddly compelling memoir of a 1962 scandal in his hometown. A former high-school teacher wrote a sexy pulp novel called Campus Sexpot, hardly disguising the identities of the real-life characters involved. Carkeet relates the episode as a nerdy kid's introduction to sex, alternating between excerpts from the pulp novel and his own reactions to it (both then and now), filling in more info about the characters as he goes along. This is light reading but smart and ingeniously put together.
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The Washington Post Book World, Andrew Ervin, reviewer, Nov. 27
[in a group review]
Bad Girls and the Boys Who Write About Them
Campus Sexpot was the name of a licentious pulp novel published in the early 1960s. Its author, Dale Koby, taught English in the small Sonora, Calif., high school that David Carkeet attended, and it turns out that not every sordid element of the book was entirely made up. Carkeet's memoir, also titled Campus Sexpot (Univ. of Georgia, $22.95), describes the fallout from having a small community's erotic secrets exposed through a thin veil of fiction.
An accomplished novelist in his own right (his most recent novel is The Error of Our Ways ), Carkeet flits back and forth between quotations from the original Sexpot , which he reproduces in boldface, and his experience of reading it at age 15: "The reader of page 2 is gratified to learn that no change has occurred in Linda's body since page 1. Once amply endowed, always amply endowed."
There are some genuinely funny moments here, most of which derive from Carkeet's formal, critical analysis of the lurid book. "Behind every porno novelist is an aspiring real novelist," he writes, "and the flashes of art are unintentionally poignant. Don parks the car. Linda leans forward invitingly. What will happen now? 'Her skirts rustled with the peculiar sound of starched petticoats.' This magnificent disharmony comes right out of the real world, where small moments of humanity intrude on our lust."
At times, Carkeet's prose reads like an additional audio commentary playing along with the original novel. "How can you describe sex," he asks, "in an age when the most relevant nouns and verbs for doing so are forbidden from publication?" It's hard to find fault with such a charming and frequently hilarious book, but he picked an easy target: How hard can it be to poke fun at a purposely sleazy, straight-to-paperback novel? But the connections Carkeet sees between his world and that of the novel turn his personal story into something far bigger. Only the best memoirs, like Campus Sexpot , reach beyond the author's own experiences and address bigger coming-of-age issues familiar to us all.
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Seven Days (Burlington, VT), Margot Harrison, reviewer, Dec. 14
Hot Type
First off, let's get the issue of the title out of the way. Campus Sexpot: A Memoir, by Middlesex writer David Carkeet, is not the memoir of a campus sexpot. Nor is it the memoir of someone who fondly remembers his encounter with a campus sexpot. Readers who are merely in search of salacious prose are better advised to check out the "sexuality" section of Barnes & Noble.
Campus Sexpot, which won this year's award for creative nonfiction from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, is one of those meta-works -- a book about a book. Campus Sexpot was the title of a pulp novel published in 1961 by "Art Enterprises" and authored by one Dale Koby, who went on to pen such weighty tomes as Airborne Passions and A Teacher Confesses to Sex in the Classroom.
Carkeet, an author of acclaimed novels, short stories and essays, has never met Dale Koby. Oddly, their paths didn't cross when Carkeet was a freshman at the high school where Koby taught English, in a sleepy little town in the foothills of California's Sierras. About a year after Koby's abrupt disappearance, however, everyone in the town of Sonora knew his name, because that's when they found out he'd written a sexy novel with their high school campus as its setting. Real teachers and students appeared in it under transparent noms de plume -- "Verne Oliver" becomes "Vern Tolliver," for example. And protagonist Don Kaufield, a teacher who leaps headlong into an ill-advised affair with his "amply endowed" student Linda Franklin, was obviously a wishful portrait of the author himself.
The ruckus Campus Sexpot caused in Sonora in 1962 was minor, because there wasn't a lot of dirt to stir up -- as Carkeet depicts it, the town was no Peyton Place. If "sexpot" Linda was based on a real person, we never find out about it. Her prodigious bust and sexual avidity seem more likely products of male fantasy.
But the gap between fantasy and reality is precisely what interests Carkeet. He describes how, when he encountered a copy of Campus Sexpot 40 years after his first, fevered adolescent reading, the novel transported him instantly back "into a state of salacious ignorance." For Carkeet, Koby's book crystallizes the conflicts and contradictions that shaped his small-town coming of age: between "good" and "bad" kids, sex myths and sex facts, pious exteriors and grittier realities. To a kid whose birds-and-bees education consisted of an admonishment to remember that sex was an "act of love," the novel's clumsy, far-from-explicit prose seemed intensely erotic, charged with the thrill of the unknown.
To account for the shock waves Campus Sexpot generated at the time, Carkeet has to recreate a lost world, since nowadays, any curious teen with access to basic cable can check out the threesomes on Nip/Tuck. To give us a sense of how it felt to read the novel in 1962, and to satisfy our own prurient curiosity, Carkeet alternates between excerpts from Koby's book -- printed in boldface -- and his own commentary throughout the first several chapters of his memoir. It's literary criticism like you've never read before.
Carkeet assesses Koby's way with words, praising him when he manages to rise above his material, which is seldom. But he also reveals juicy, sometimes ironic connections between pulp and reality. For instance, a teacher in the book who confides, "I've spent my life being interested in girls with hot pants" is based on Carkeet's faculty advisor for the Order of DeMolay, a prestigious Masonic offshoot that engaged young men in "somber rituals."
In a publisher interview, Carkeet says he imposed one "rule" on himself in writing the memoir: "I could talk about an event from my past only if it plausibly sprang from some reference in the original Campus Sexpot." Restrictive as it may seem, this framework gives Carkeet the liberty to explore quite a few aspects of his youth, including DeMolay -- a "religion without a god" -- reading habits in Sonora, sex jokes circa 1962, his fumbling efforts to gain sexual experience, and the "essential art" of coexisting with one's enemies in a small town. The portrait of a way of life that emerges is richly detailed, fond without being sentimental, only occasionally cutesy. The last chapter is a tribute to a man who in Carkeet's mind represents Dale Koby's polar opposite: his father, the town's judge, who conquered his demons and lived a life that was "good" in all senses.
Carkeet describes Koby, by contrast, as "one who seems willfully to have chosen the dark path." Readers may find themselves wishing that Carkeet had done more research into the life of this self-styled outcast and sexual maverick who lends the memoir its moniker and some of its funniest passages -- a sort of Ed Wood of the printed word. We learn that Koby died in 1979, but not much else. Still, anyone who's ever browsed a shelf of vintage pulp novels will appreciate the insights of Carkeet's version of Campus Sexpot, even in an age when salacious prose is easy to come by.